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Why We Disagree with The New York Times

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Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#81

Post by vorpalhex »

esrauch wrote: post #43
vorpalhex wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with offering a public API. There's everything wrong with offering a secret, non-public API where you give a third party I didn't consent to full access to all of my data. See how that's a bit different? One of them is offering public information (say, stock quotes), publicly. One of them is offering private information (my sexual orientation and date of birth) to tons of third parties I didn't…

Surely it is only giving blackberry the information if you type in your login credentials on a blackberry right? I don't see how the situation is actually different now: if you run the official Facebook app on your Galaxh phone then Samsung could scrape and exfiltrate the data anytime it wants. It is Samsung's fault if they do it not Facebook's.

If Samsung secretly runs a keylogger on all their phones and then steals your data that way, that's a Samsung problem and you should be angry. That is not what happened here.

Facebook officially blessed other platforms, allowed them to say you were signing into Facebook, and then allowed those platforms to have access not only to your data, but your friends exhaustive data. Facebook was aware of this, explicitly allowed this, and their only safeguard was vaguely worded policies with their partners.

Even if the partners haven't stolen any data or broken their policies, Facebook intentionally and knowingly gave my data to a third party without my consent. Presumably now all 66 of these device partners have my full data, and I did not sign in on their device or otherwise authorize it.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#82

Post by jbeckham »

I had a Windows phone that used these API's. When Windows Phone 7 came out, Facebook didn't create the Facebook App for that OS, Microsoft did. It looked like what you expected Facebook to have built and it worked like the Facebook App that other platforms had. The whole purpose of the API agreement with Microsoft was to guarantee that the Facebook App they wrote would still work years down the road. Microsoft did not have access to my data. They were allowed to write an app that allowed ME to access my data.

The NY Times article makes it sound like Microsoft was allowed access to my data. They were not. They were allowed to create an app that had access to an API so I could access my data from the Windows Phone device.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#83

Post by [deleted] »

_jal wrote: post #27
jacobsheehy wrote: post #2

It reads like a long defensive argument, "how else did you expect us to make huge sums of money"? It is exactly as tone-deaf and legalese as you would expect. There is no new information here; Facebook says legal contracts actually protect your data so it can't go anywhere, "just trust us", etc. > These partners signed agreements that prevented people’s Facebook information from being used for any other purpose than…

> from being used for any other purpose than to recreate Facebook-like experiences > they consent to having psychological experiments performed on them with no further notice Sounds like the third parties delivered! The difference between Facebook and a casino is more about the physical limitations of their storefronts than business models.

[deleted]

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#84

Post by assblaster »

nemild wrote: post #65
dreamcompiler wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not naive at all. When it's not in your business interest to manipulate reality, you manipulate perception.

I think it's a more complex picture. I did my own deep dive after years of reflecting on this: Inside the Bubble at Facebook "Management will laud what employees do, show them selective facts that justify their views, and hire/promote those who behave similarly to them. Employees in isolated teams with training in a single function may not realize the broad, unintended effects of their company's work. They'll assume…

Sounds like nuclear weapons research in Tennessee during World War 2: only inform employees enough so that they can carry on the work without jeopardizing the mission (building nukes vs building a platform which owns people's information).

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#85

Post by miracle2k »

Djvacto wrote: post #44
miracle2k wrote: post #36

The New York Times should be ashamed of itself. Facebook let companies like Apple integrate with their platform. To do so, these companies sent the same sequence of bytes from your mobile phone to the Facebook server, as the Facebook app does, or as any person can do. I can write my own Facebook app today, and there is nothing that Facebook can do about it, except sue me. THAT IS A GOOD THING. LITERALLY FIVE MINUTES…

Forgive what may be a not-fully-informed question/opinion, but isn't the issue that 3rd parties were able to see private information? Not public information? Like you send the same sequence of bytes that they do, but the difference is that it should be different depending on who is sending the bytes, no?

The app that was written by Apple, or by Blackberry, had to ask you for your password first (or possible use a different kind of authentication were you had to allow access). Without that, they could not send the "right bytes", and thus, the Facebook server would not send back any private information.

In other words, it worked exactly like the Facebook app written by Facebook itself.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#86

Post by detaro »

jbeckham wrote: post #82

I had a Windows phone that used these API's. When Windows Phone 7 came out, Facebook didn't create the Facebook App for that OS, Microsoft did. It looked like what you expected Facebook to have built and it worked like the Facebook App that other platforms had. The whole purpose of the API agreement with Microsoft was to guarantee that the Facebook App they wrote would still work years down the road. Microsoft did no…

The NYT article says that Facebook told them that some partners stored that data on their servers. Do you have a good citation that this does not refer to these device integrations, given you so strongly claim it doesn't? (It's very well possible that it's a misleading quote by the NYT, or a misunderstanding, but I don't see a clear answer in any of what we know) That's from my perspective the critical point here.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#87

Post by graedus »

dominotw wrote: post #71
Liquix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is that saying "I promise not to murder someone" does not in any way prevent said party turning around and murdering someone - signing a contract does not prevent these companies from violating the terms of the contract.

> signing a contract does not prevent these companies from violating the terms of the contract. So whats the point of any legal agreement then?

In theory, discourages certain behavior with the threat of legal action. In practice, this doesn't work sometimes for various reasons. What if you're 95% certain you have the resources to crush your opponent in a legal battle, still profiting handsomely net of the legal fees you incur?

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#88

Post by supercanuck »

makomk wrote: post #54
supercanuck wrote: post #5

It seems they don't really disagree but are simply saying, its not as bad as you think. Is there anything factually incorrect in the New York Times reporting?

It's one of those articles that's technically true-ish so long as you redefine words to mean something very different from what people would expect them to, but is written in a way designed to misinform basically everyone who reads it. For example, when they say "Facebook Gave Device Makers Deep Access to Data on Users and Friends", they mean Facebook let them write software that could be run by their users and give…

I think the point is, data goes into those companies and in some cases gets stored on their servers and from there, who knows what happens.

Facebook makes it sounds like the user is in control.

Re: Why We Disagree with The New York Times

#90

Post by derefr »

dominotw wrote: post #71
Liquix wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is that saying "I promise not to murder someone" does not in any way prevent said party turning around and murdering someone - signing a contract does not prevent these companies from violating the terms of the contract.

> signing a contract does not prevent these companies from violating the terms of the contract. So whats the point of any legal agreement then?

Punishment after-the-fact to statistically disincentivize behaviours we want to disincentivize. It doesn’t prevent the thing from happening ever, it just makes it so that when it does, inevitably, happen, the system pushes back against the offender. This makes rational actors less likely to do things they could be sued for. But 1. not all actors in a market are rational; and 2. sometimes it’s rational to be “evil” if the upside is large and the chance of getting caught is very small.

Consider also: traffic laws. The punishments make most people obey them. There are still drunks, malicious drivers, just plain bad drivers, and people doing U-turns on the highway when they think no cops are around.

If you want an assurance that you won’t be hit by one of these, you have to just avoid traffic altogether.

If you give someone else an assurance that e.g. their child will never be hit by a car, then you have to never take said child on the road.

Facebook gave an assurance that our data would never cross paths with a bad actor. The only way to do that is to never take the data to where the bad actors might be.

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